Private Profit From A Public Trust

I would be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge this fine column by Margaret Carlson of Bloomberg News on Kenneth Tomlinson, the former chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and current head of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which oversees the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe. The column deals with a variety of Republican scandals, but it gives Tomlinson “center stage” to highlight the malfeasance under his watch.

As Carlson noted…

(Tomlinson) hired a friend on contract without notice to the board or staff and signed invoices saying that work was done, without any evidence that it was, according to a summary of the latest report by the State Department's inspector general that was made public Tuesday.

Employees at the board of governors called the unnamed (and unseen) employee, who was paid almost a quarter of a million dollars, ``the phantom,'' according to the office of Representative Howard Berman, a California Democrat and one of three lawmakers to release the summary.

The State Department inspector general also found that Tomlinson had government employees work on personal matters and used board of governors ``resources in support of his horse- racing operation,'' of all things.

Our tax dollars at work – don’t you love it? Also…

Tomlinson requested compensation in excess of the 130-day annual maximum he was supposed to work, and then, amazingly, billed both the Broadcasting Board of Governors and Corporation for Public Broadcasting for work on the same exact days on 14 occasions.

Ethically challenged, you say? I agree, which makes him a perfect fit for Bushco.

So what has Tomlinson been doing now that he is in charge of the Voice of America? According to this American Prospect story…

In June (2005), for example, when the VOA’s experienced TV health reporter proposed an exclusive story covering the trial of a malaria vaccine in Kenya by doctors from Walter Reed Hospital, the network’s administrators urged her to cover a joint anti-terrorism exercise in Senegal instead -- even though the VOA’s Pentagon radio correspondent was already assigned to do the piece. Malaria kills 3 million Africans every year, even more than the number killed by AIDS, and 80 percent are children. Yet the VOA’s acting news director, Ted Iliff, decided that the Walter Reed story would be too costly and was “not compelling” enough to send a reporter overseas. The correspondent was instructed to do the terrorism story -- despite the Pentagon correspondent’s warning that she wouldn’t get the visuals needed for good television, which turned out to be accurate.

So why was the VOA correspondent sent on a pointless and expensive trip to Senegal? A supervisor told her that David Jackson, the VOA director handpicked by Tomlinson, wanted “to make a good impression on the Pentagon,” VOA sources say.

This groundbreaking moment in journalism also occurred under Tomlinson’s supervision.

(Tomlinson’s) critics also point to Jackson’s insistence on a dubious story about Salman Pak, a reputed terrorist training camp near Baghdad. Prior to the March 2003 invasion and for weeks afterward, some military officials believed the site was linked to al-Qaeda, providing much-needed justification for the war. By May 2003, however, when Jackson began pressing the VOA TV unit for coverage, The New Yorker and others had discredited the story.

“Nobody believed it except the Rush Limbaugh wing, but Jackson kept hounding radio and television people to cover it,” recalls a VOA staffer. Editors sought to wave Jackson off the story, according to agency sources, but he kept demanding that the story be pursued -- even after U.S. military officials in Baghdad no longer claimed any link, and the VOA’s reporter on the ground had explained that the al-Qaeda connection was “bullshit.”

I can personally attest to the fact that we used that eight-letter adjective frequently in journalism school.

And oh yes, why was Tomlinson originally upset with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in general and Bill Moyers in particular? As Moyers explained in this great speech from May 2005…

Ideologues don’t want you to go beyond the typical labels of left and right because people may start believing you. They embrace a world view that cannot be proven wrong because they will admit no evidence to the contrary. They want your reporting to validate their belief system and when it doesn’t, God forbid. Never mind that their own stars were getting a fair shake on “NOW,” Gigot, Viguerie, David Keen of the American Conservative Union, Steven Moore of the Club for Growth. Our reporting – our reporting was giving the radical right fits because it wasn’t the party line. It wasn’t that we were getting it wrong, either. Only three times in three years did we err factually, and in each case we corrected those errors as soon as we confirmed their inaccuracy. I believe our broadcast was the best researched on public broadcasting.

And the problem was that we were telling stories that partisans in power didn’t want told, and we were getting it right, not rightwing. Let me tell you something – and we can argue about this at some other time – I’ve always thought the American eagle needed a left wing and a right wing. The right wing would see to it that economic interests had their legitimate concerns addressed. The left wing would see to it that ordinary people were included in the bargain. And both would keep the great bird on course. But with two right wings or two left wings, it’s no longer an eagle, and it’s going to crash.

And that will suit Tomlinson and the Repugs just fine, because if it can’t fly, the only place where it will be able to live is in a cage.

Update 9/1: I guess "freezing the nomination" is the closest thing our ethically compromised Repug government does to punishing one of its own.